Unemployment insurance (UI) can affect unemployment duration and re-employment wages, through various dimensions of unemployed workers' job search behavior. We shed light on the effects of UI on job search behavior using new longitudinal data: we link administrative registers to data from a...

During the Great Recession, U.S. unemployment benefits were extended by up to 73 weeks. Theory predicts that extensions increase unemployment by discouraging job search, a partial equilibrium effect. Using data from the large job board CareerBuilder.com, I find that a 10% increase in benefit...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (FPUC) increased US unemployment benefits by $600 a week. Theory predicts that FPUC will decrease job applications, and could decrease vacancy creation. We estimate the effect of FPUC on job applications and vacancy...

While unemployment insurance (UI) could help attenuate racial income disparities in the U.S., Black unemployed workers seem to receive less UI benefits than White ones. To understand why, we analyze administrative data from random audits on UI claims in all U.S. states. We first document a large...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses had to close and unemployment skyrocketed. To help the unemployed, the CARES Act increased US unemployment benefits by $600 a week, which increased unemployment benefit replacement rates (benefit/wage) to unprecedentedly high levels, above 100% for...

The U.S. unemployment insurance (UI) system operates as a federal-state partnership, where states have considerable autonomy to decide on specific UI rules. This has allowed for systematically stricter rules in states with a larger Black population. We study how these differences in state rules...